We can't just mark a ballot

Before becoming a minister, my field was literature.  The most important lesson in criticism is not to criticize a work for what it's not. I published a recent sermon a few days ago which garnered many responses on one of the FaceBook pages I link to, most of them negative. My sermon was not intended to be a call to the barricades. I would love to storm the Bastille, but tell me where it is in 22nd century America. Is it in the school board? The town hall? The state capitol? Congress? The White House? It's a genius of democracy that power is diffuse, and to use it we need to know who to address. I know my congregation audience. One response I especially appreciated was a friend coming forward to say she, who had never been to a public protest in her life, would attend the next one with me. That's the best I could want.

I'm uninterested in responding to the criticism. Again, from literature, the work stands or falls on its own. But it did leave me wanting to make a stronger statement about the responsibility we have as people of faith to call it as we see it. This administration is actively involved in crafting and doing evil to the people least able to defend themselves among us: immigrants, children, the undocumented, non-Christians, women, people who work with their hands, gays and lesbians, members of the trans~ community, the poor who rely on government services and the poor who work for minimum wage and less, the homeless, the mentally ill, native Americans, the sick and the dying. In short, the members of the Beloved Community who most need community.

We're reaching a vote soon that can do some real good, that can put into place the actors we're counting on to move the country back in the direction of helping, not hurting. Of giving, not greed. But even if we win every single seat we hope for it means nothing without our involvement. When Obama was elected, our work had only started, and it was going to be a long, hard slog, even with an ally in the presidency, to accomplish what we need to. When he won reelection, we needed to continue working, maybe work harder.

We have been lazy, leaving it to others to do the things we need done, as if we can mark a ballot every couple years and that does it. That's why one of the greatest presidents of my time has been followed by one of the worst, why he has taken it as his mission, and his supporters' mission, to dismantle even the few good things we accomplished to help people who need it. 

We can't change that direction with cobblestones or bullets, even by overturning tables in the temples. We have to work together, understand one another and our friends, and make the changes necessary. And then we have to pay attention. 

Truth Matters

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a New York senator and ambassador from my young adulthood to whom I might attribute my love for politics, famously asserted, "Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts." That quote has had quite a workout this past year, and if anything the recent election seems to have put the lie to it. Everyone, particularly Donald Trump and his supporters, are apparently entitled to their own facts, as if some objective concept called "truth" doesn't matter.

Let's set aside the questions of whether there is something like an Ultimate Truth or Cosmic Truth; those are both too broad and too big for a consideration of this Little Orange Man. But a few days ago I got into an argument with several co-workers, people who work with medicine and health care, for whom there has to be a down-to-the-bones truth that the body operates this way and these substances have this effect on it and cleaning the limbs this way affect it in this way in order for them to do their jobs and expect good results. They absolutely asserted that, bad as Trump "may be," Hillary Clinton was worse because she ignored the telephone call from the American embassy under attack in Libya.

Simply: Untrue. (Yes, I rely on "notoriously liberal" Snopes.com for information and credentialing because we need to have a final authority to which we can appeal, and while the site isn't perfect, and couldn't be, its fact-checkers try their best to both get at the truth and be objective and are free of the lure of advertisers and friends in high political places. Particularly now, when fake news sites are easy and profitable to create.)

It matters what is true, not only in political decisions but in everything. Medicine and biology is replicable and matters. Climate change theory is replicable and matters. Demographics matters. Donald Trump's lies matter, especially now he has won the election. This matters: Plain and simple, truth matters. Assert the truth in the face of lies.

We Will Not Be Silent

I've waited a week to make this post, partly out of inertia and partly out of a desire to get the message right. I am fiercely partisan, there's no getting around it. I believe strongly in the work of progressives and the liberal impulse. Christianity's most meaningful words for me are "What you do to the least of these you do to me." 

I am furious at the outcome of the presidential election. In that, I join a lot of people. I'm among the first to argue that doesn't make us right. There is a reason we don't accept majority rules in our system.

I am furious, but not at a Hillary Clinton loss. I'm not furious at a Republican win. And I'm not furious with Donald Trump. I'm furious that in the Twenty-First Century, Donald Trump ran on a platform of bigotry, misogyny, and anti-immigrant sentiment culminating in a fantasy about a literal wall between two nations (have we learned nothing from East and West Berlin?), and won.

I am furious with the people responsible for this. I am furious with Donald Trump voters and sympathizers.

I am furious that Donald Trump earned enough votes to make him the candidate in the first place. I am furious that what most of us experienced as a vanity campaign, all about him, never about the rest of us, was capable of lying about the career of a veteran politician and winning on that strength. I am furious someone endorsed by numerous white supremacy and anti-Semitic organizations, not a single one of which he disavowed, managed in 2016 to win. I am furious that in contemporary America there are a number of people who have both a genuine and deserved fear of the aftermath of a Donald Trump victory. I am furious that Donald Trump could accuse Latino/as of multiple falsities and yet garnered nearly 30% of their votes. I am furious that many politicians in the Republican Party took the drastic, courageous, and necessary step of publicaly disavowing their candidate and his views, and yet 90% of self-identified Republicans voted for him (and let us not forget the several, like Paul Ryan, Bob Dole, and Ted Cruz, who regaled the public with how poor was the reflection he gave the party, only to cynically pull the lever for him). I am furious that a person who is on record as having little but disdain for women was voted for by nearly half of them. I am furious that for the first time in modern American political history, a candidate threatened to jail his opponent if he won.

Donald Trump may, in time, come to surprise us. Once faced with the enormities of office and the necessity of compromising in order to acheive anything (as he has already learned how, despite his elevation because he is not a career politician, he simply cannot do the simplest things without them), he may become less divisive, less self-satisfied, less inflammatory. He will also then become less liked by his followers, which is always what happens to a president after an election, but seems especially likely in Trump's case. I doubt it, but it is possible.

I don't care. Donald Trump won and he won with the votes of people who, at the very least, did not give a damn how what he said and did could affect their neighbors. That will never, ever sit right with me, and it never should.

258 candles-one week and one day

As we are coming to the end of waiting for our opportunity to decide this election, and for the wild conjecture and nastiness to be, if not over, then perhaps lessened, we should be looking further both inward and outward to others. This is a wonderful memory by an administrator, someone who most of us are inclined to think of as a bloodless bean-counter, about three victims of shooting violence that focuses on who they were in her life. We should all have such an effect on others.

258 candles-days 159-165

It may seem a little difficult, shoehorning this reflection by Brian Feldman into my intent to post positive stories during this stultifyingly divisive election, but bear with me. In noting that it celebrates both the best and the worst of the World Wide Web, Feldman tips into a truth about nearly everything, that no matter what the experience might be, it can be seen both in a positive and negative light (sometimes by the same person nearly simultaneously). While it is obviously a negative for Semisonic, which in this case loses credit, at least for people who fall for this delusion, it is not only a positive for Green Day (or potentially so; as a punk-sympathizer, if I were Billy Joe Armstrong I would be offended at the notion I sang such inoffensive tripe in such a louche way), but for the recognition that this is how history works. It's the way we attribute the writing of the Bible to various individual writers or The Iliad and Odyssey to the fictional blind poet Homer, even the various misattributions of quotes, real and made up, to long-dead speakers. They become the future "truth" for those works. Some future generation might venerate Green Day's seminal crossover hit "Closing Time" as the moment when postpunk and pop were tethered together, forming some future clumped musical form, like the moment in 1973 when DJ Kool Herc spun one of two turntables repeatedly back to the break, initiating the melange that would become hip hop.

258 candles-days 156-163

I love this commercial. I don't know who might have made it but it encapsulates, in a minute and a half, my belief in change and redemption. It shows a life which, while I'm glad I don't live it, I will gladly describe as being worthwhile in the end.

258 candles-day 121

When I was younger I saw a movie on the noon TV broadcast in Boston, where I was living, that's stayed with me all these years. It was called The Next Voice You Hear and starred James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). It wasn't a particularly good movie, just one of those you'd probably call "quiet" and "unassuming." Despite its plot, that one evening God starts speaking on the radio, it didn't have a really big message.

Anyway, this is what I thought of today when someone drew my attention to a video by Rabbi David Aaron, Hearing the Voice of God. The 1950 Next Voice didn't have or couldn't use the language that Aaron has but the message, at least as I remember it, is similar: God doesn't speak to us but speaks through us. This is, I think, as profound a message as anything can be, and needs to be remembered as we slog through the rest of this election.

258 candles-days 113-119

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: As KRS-One and Boogie Down Productions used to say, "You Must Learn."

258 candles-day 58

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: “Go back home to mummy...She’ll smack your bottom.”

258 candles-day 57

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Using data and technology to determine where anti-poverty work is most needed.

258 candles-day 21

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: A primer on the Growth Trap of the New, Digital Economy. 

258 candles-day 12

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: KPISS Radio.

we would experience god in the everyday

I have been reading this book for a few days, and while some of it strikes me as very weak (both in writing and in theology), some, like the following, gives me hope. As someone who is, by virtue of working as a pastor to a community of teens who are both desperate for spirit and wary of it, trying actively to achieve a new type of worship service, this is good reading whose real life application is difficult to determine.

During the last few decades, there has been no small amount of controversy in Christian churches over worship style. As those who advocated for maintaining "traditional" worship and those preferring "contemporary" forms struggled against one another, many started referring to the conflict as the "worship wars." Churches within the emerging Christian faith, however, appear to be moving beyond the worship wars. They are discovering a "third way" in worship, one that cannot easily be categorized as either traditional or contemporary...The third way very much appears to be a dismantling of the Tradition for the purpose not of abandonment but of reerecting it in a new place...[They] refer to what they do as "ancient-future worship" or "emerged worship" or "experiential worship" or "incarnational worship...

Although incarnational worship takes a very wide variety of forms, several common threads hold it together. First, it is centered on experiencing God incarnate in everyday life more than learning about God...Rather, worship leaders start with the question, "How do people experience God as Creator in everyday life" The whole world then becomes a palate from which leaders work to open people up to experiencing God as Creator in worship. The idea is not to manufacture an experience but rather to open participants to the possibility of an experience. Incarnational worship operates on the assumption that God's Spirit really is alive and well in this world and will not hesitate to stir the soul if people's hearts are open and attentive...

Second, incarnational worship tends to be mediated through a wide variety of multisensory elements, which may range from quite ancient to postmodern. Participants are as likely to experience worship through smell, taste, and physical touch as they are through sight and sound...[Prayer] and contemplative forms of Scripture reading, such as lectio divina...may be interwoven with film clips, jazz or rock music, and hands-on artistic creation.

Emphasis on the arts and artistic expression, in fact, is a third unifying element... Practitioners...feel that worship should be as artistic as it is scripturally based...[Churches] of the emerging Christian faith [may] eventually [reclaim] the church's more ancient role of supporting the arts and artistic expression...in a new way.

Finally, incarnational worship is frequently created by clusters of people rather than by single individuals or pairs. Pastors work with a worship team made up of both clergy and laity for generating ideas, creating the service, and carrying it off. In this we may be seeing the Reformation principle of the Priesthood of All Believers practiced on a larger and deeper scale than it ever has been before.

--From The Phoenix Affirmations: A New Vision for the Future of Christianity by Eric Elnes

where are we going? who will we be?

I was surprised to find on Thursday of last week that I was preaching today, and so came up with a quick sermon based on a topic I've been giving a lot of thought to lately, how churches, and especially Unitarian Universalism, is changing and what will come after the current iteration of "church" falls by the wayside, as it must.  It's a topic I intend to cover in greater depth and at greater leisure in the future.

WHERE ARE WE GOING?

WHO WILL WE BE?

A Sermon Delivered to DUUC

October 21, 2012,

            Last week was witness to the change in fortunes of a singular institution that, while some people might argue its glory days were in the past, remained a force on the landscape of culture, valued for its pronouncements on events and personages, its predictions for the future, and its history for having contributed to the zeitgeist that has been America for nearly the whole of what was not too far in the past called the American Century.

            I’m talking, of course, of the decision by Newsweek not to publish a print edition any longer.

            I joke, but as with almost everything that happens nowadays, it is a facet through which we can view a lot of what’s going on and see almost the same things.  The newswasn’t delivered in the most recent issue but on Newsweek’s website.  Does anyone even read Newsweek any longer?  Under Tina Brown, who made such major shifts to the New Yorker in the 80s and the revived Vanity Fair in the 90s, it has gone from an interesting way of catching up with what was important last week to a throwaway on the order of the Enquirer or the Weekly World News, talked more about for its controversial covers and headlines than for its content. 

            But that isn’t entirely Brown’s fault or Newsweek’s for that matter.  Technology has jumped over the magazine’s 80 year history, from a point when here in the Midwest learning about what was important in the past month in New York and Washington and London and Berlin was a miracle of communication, to the wonders of radio where Walter Winchell could report to Mr. and Mrs. America and all the ships at sea what happened in last week’s battles, and to the staggering TV images of Vietnam battles in our living rooms, to CNN’s coverage of SCUD missiles as they landed, to our following live Twitter feeds of Syrian rebels between blasts of gunfire.  In such a brave new world, last week’s news, no matter how much analysis a writer can bring to it, remains, well, last week’s news.

            It’s not just Newsweek.  We’re long past the point of lamenting the death of daily newspapers and free weeklies and network evening news.  The 24/7 newscycle and that it operates and relies on a constant stream of novelty and publicity is both a given and a cliché now.  A newspaper whose subscribers number in the tens of thousands—and Newsweek’s base of 1.5 million subscribers not only buries that of all but the top names of daily newspapers like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, or the London Times, but used to be an indicator of great health for a magazine, certainly showing it would continue in the black for some time to come—can’t keep pace with something like the Huffington Post, a news aggregator that relies on its unpaid bloggers linking their commentary to stories at other news sources for its reputation as the go-to place for up-to-date information on, say, the eight people killed by a Beirut car bomb or whether Britney Spears was on meth when she shaved her head.

            A painting by Paul Gaugin has the resonant title Where Do We Come From?  What are We? Where are We Going?  Many theorists would argue these are the questions religion attempts to answer and I would even suggest they’re the official questions of UU.  I’m not the first to say it but the idea that we are damned by the ancient Chinese curse, “May you live in interesting times,” gains traction every year.  Every generation experiences change, of course, but it seems we are enmeshed in change that metastasizes like a cancer just as we begin to acclimate to it.  We had only begun to understand phone technology when we started using cordless phones, and then car phones, and then cell phones, and then phones that could take pictures, phones that could connect with the internet, iphones, smartphones. And this new technology brought new languages, often abbreviated words or condensations of words or acronyms or the use of pictograms.  Last year I taught a very good book called EverythingBad is Good for You by Steven Johnson, whose thesis is that, “Where pure problem-solving is concerned, we’re getting smarter…It’s not the change in our nutritional diet…it’s the change in our mental diet.”

            Johnson goes on:

Think of the cognitive labor—and play—that your average ten-year-old would have experienced outside of school a hundred years ago:  reading books when they were available, playing with simple toys, improvising neighborhood games like stickball and kick the can, and most of all doing household chores—or even working as a child-laborer.  Compare that to the cultural and technological mastery of a ten-year-old today:  following dozens of professional sports teams; shifting effortlessly from phone to IM to email in communicating with friends; probing and telescoping through immense virtual worlds; adopting and troubleshooting new media technologies without flinching…Their classrooms may be overcrowded and their teachers underpaid, but in the world outside of school, [the contemporary ten-year-old] brains are being challenged at every turn by new forms of media and technology that cultivate sophisticated problem-solving skills.

Obviously, per Johnson, the news is not all bad.  In fact, I argue that it’s not bad at all.  But it is confusing. 

            In the current issue of UU World, we read how the official number of American UUs hit an alltime high in 2008 of nearly 165,000 but has dropped since then to a rough plateau hovering around the 162,000 mark.  Over the decade from 2001 to 2011, “22 percent of congregations…shrunk by 20 percent or more.”  Congregations with fewer than 60 members were hit worst; nearly half of them saw a 10 percent loss.  But, you might say, that drop to 162,000, that’s only a loss of 3000 people over 3 years, hardly a rush for the exits.  Such a drop can be attributed to membership death. 

            Perhaps.  It also suggests 1000 more people died than joined our faith annually.  As Bob Dylan so eloquently put it, he not busy being born is busy dying.  There are unquestioningly many things at which we UUs are busy but being born is not among them. 

            It isn’t only UUs, of course.  It’s a common theme in the conversations of seminarians and religious people in general that churches, no matter their denominations, no matter their social policy, no matter their political affiliation, are in the process of dying.  An article in, yes, Newsweek from 2009 notes the concerns of R. Albert Mohler Jr., the president of Southern Baptist Theological, that “the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent.”  Diana Butler Bass, a kind of religious membership authority, makes note of the following:

[Between 2000 and 2010,] new surveys and polls pointed to an erosion of organized Christianity in nearly all its forms, with only “nondenominational” [mostly Pentecostal and fundamentalist in outlook] churches showing a slight numerical increase…All sorts of people—even mature, faithful Christians—are finding conventional religion increasingly less satisfying, are attending church less regularly, and are longing for new expressions of spiritual community…”People just don’t come to church anymore,” pastors told me.  “It doesn’t really matter what we do or how solid our community is”…Many people are just bored.  They are bored with church as usual, church-as-club, church-as-entertainment, or church-as-work.  Many of my friends, faithful churchgoers for decades, are dropping out because religion is dull, the purview of folks who never want to change…[I]n the first decade of the twenty-first century even the most conservative Christian churches have stopped growing.  Membership gains have slowed to a crawl, and in some cases membership is dwindling…New megachurches spring up and are successful for a time—until they are forced to close down and sell their buildings.  Even the Catholic Church has barely maintained its share of the population…The old argument that liberal churches are in decline and conservative ones are growing is not true…Everyone is in the same situation:  a religious bear market.  Indeed, the first decade of the twenty-first century could rightly be called the Great Religious Recession.

It’s not only UUs and Christians who see these declines.  One researcher of contemporary synagogue attendance estimates that only one out of every fifty Jews attends services weekly.  Conversely, Islam has been a growth industry in the US, seeing an advance in reported membership between 2000 and 2011 from 2,000,000 to 2,600,000.  Much of their growth is attributable to new immigrants and native conversions.  It’s very possible that, as a relatively new religion to the US, novelty may be a contributing factor in Islam’s growth, as it was for Buddhism in the 50s, and given time may fall back to similar low numbers as other, more established religions.

            Is this a good thing or a bad thing?  I don’t think either of those words apply legitimately.  It is like the coming predominance of Spanish as the US’s most-spoken language or the decline of “white” as its dominant ethnicity or the preponderance of food service jobs over other employment in the near future.  There’s nothing “good” or “bad” about it; it simply is the way things will be, the path our choices have led us to.

Well, what of it, we might legitimately ask?  Let organized religions dissipate.  It looks as if we will go the same way, maybe a little earlier, but really, there’s nothing much to lose there, is there?  After all, as UUs we’re already convinced it doesn’t take a single authority, God or the Bible or Allah or the Torah notwithstanding, to tell us the proper way to behave with one another.  We know it’s possible, maybe even preferable, to conduct ourselves morally without having to look forward to a better afterlife or without the threat of condemnation to hell or some other punishment.  Maybe the disappearance of supernaturally-based religions is an indication that our faith, reason-focused, committed to social justice, is effective and taking root.

It might happen.  But nearly everyone in the early part of the twentieth century who studied religions recognized then that it would soon dissolve into a puddle under the weight of its own self-righteousness and focus on groupfeel and we see how that turned out.  Don’t mistake what I’m saying.  I’m not suggesting that religions or denominations or even churches as brick-and-mortar structures are going away anytime soon.  Those seem too ingrained in our psyches to be in any great danger of disappearing. And the information I’m giving you seems exclusive to the US.  In Central America, in Africa, in Asia, religion remains almost exactly as it’s been for the past century, if more conservative and reactionary than we’ve usually seen it on a national scale.  What I mean to suggest is that in the near future American religions will undergo a change such that we might not recognize them as what we grew up with or the way we’ve always experienced religion. 

Just as the English we speak is different from the English our grandparents or our grandchildren speak—different words, different emphases, different intent and forms of address—but still recognizable as English, so will UU be different from what we currently practice.  It won’t be better or worse than what we currently call UU but it can’t help but be different.

Butler Bass writes that our religious future relies, rather than on the certainties and dogmas it’s been heir to for the past centuries (and again, this is only in the US she’s writing about), on what she calls believing, behaving, and belonging.  She quotes social theorist Harvey Cox as explaining, “What I see…is that people frequently want to refer to themselves now as not really ‘religious’ but ‘spiritual’…What I think it really means is that people want to have access to the sacred without going through institutional and doctrinal scaffolding.  They want a more direct experience of God and Spirit.” 

She sees Christianity as “moving from being a religion about God to being an experience of God.”  She writes that post-WWII,

External authorities gave way to internal ones, as we moved away from conformity to social structures toward the authentic self in society.  Whether the switch is good or bad is beside the point.  This revolution has happened…[and] questions of meaning and purpose have become supremely important. ..Whereas [once] religious behavior was largely a matter of how [we do things], spiritual practice entails the inner experience of what [we do] and why [we do them] as people must intentionally choose their actions and vocations.  After a choice is made, then we craft a new way of faith…Choice, meaning and practice interlace to open us to purposeful ways of being in the world.

            Sadly most churches, including our own, despite their mission statements and their intentions, are not very good at being communities.  She writes, “Just putting a bunch of people together in a church building doesn’t make them a community.  Community is about relationships and making connections.  That’s spiritual work…[that] may or may not happen in a church.”  The community isn't only the people we see on a regular basis—the people we work with constitute that—but is composed of a set of relationships that extend beyond other human beings and what we consider God or Ultimate Reality into all our surroundings, trees and buildings and fish and rabbits and boxelder bugs and is dependent on the way we are with them.  As our Unitarian name suggests, everything is one.  Everything is connected.  Our spirituality involves our experience of all our relationships, with everyone and everything.  That sounds mystical, doesn’t it?  Relationship and community is about as ethereal as you can get. 

            Change is the only constant.  People die, buildings go away, trends rise and fall, technologies evolve.  Nothing stays the way it was.  Our Christian, Jewish and Muslim cousins might say only the fidelity of God remains the same, but if that’s the hub around which the rest of the universe wheels certainly the way we respond to it changes too.  As Walt Whitman wrote, “There is no object so soft but it makes a hub for the wheeled universe…Everything goes onward and outward, nothing collapses…Nothing endures but personal qualities.” 

            If this last is true, that who we are is what endures, then we need to move beyond who we are now—the ones not busy being born but busy dying—to who we will be.  It isn’t easy, of course, nothing worth doing is.  But it is as necessary as taking our next breath.

mine is a farflung congregation

a friend of mine, someone I've been close to for about a dozen years, has had a hard month.  her mother died in the past few weeks and she has to put down two of her dogs, so I drove into the hub to spend a few hours listening to her.

the past few weeks I've been considering the word community and what it means in a religious or spiritual context, mostly because of classes I'm currently taking, but also because I'm thinking about what the future holds for religion in the near future.  it seems likely that, as more churches go under and decommission, what slack will need to be taken up will be by small homechurches similar to the kind the newer testament writes about.  tiny congregations of fewer than 50 people meeting for worship, discussion and eating together.

this strikes me as having great potential--I can't be the first person to think one of the greatest failures of codified religion has been its success (in terms of growth)--as the idea of tiny, neighborhood-based, interconnected groups of people who see one another on an almost daily basis appeals to the communitarian spirit in me.  but what struck me in my reflection this afternoon on the drive was the large and spreadout character of the tribe I've come to consider mine.

that I identify with the homeless and people on the fringe is nothing new, but it was the realization of the tremendous distances between people who I check in with regularly that set me aback.  aside from the congregation I'm currently serving near the hub, there are a number of individuals I stay in close contact with, and who tell me they still think of me as their minister, here on the rim, as well as people in the hub who are unaffiliated with any congregation and others spread across the country, from the east coast to the west and who, when they post or admit to something that makes them catch their breath as if drawing another may make them choke, I would jump in the car and visit if it was feasible.  (I contact them any way I can, which has to be the way it's done now.)

during my time with my friend today we spoke for a while about my decision to move from teaching to ministry and my use of the talent I have in caring about people.  she had developed a dog tarot--it was gorgeous--and we took turns reading the cards.  I hadn't read cards in years and was rusty but fell right in with her interpretation.  what I was reminded of, more than anything else, was the fragility of our psyches, how easily the thin skin of our calm can be pierced, and the necessity for having someone there to witness it and tell us it's all right.

the little box on my couch

my friend turquoise died this morning.  I wasn't there--she was living in california.  I don't have any good stories about her.  I only met her once and it was for a few hours over beers when she was visiting the rim.  her death wasn't unexpected--she'd been suffering from cancer almost since I met her and in what chaplains (and health pros) call the active dying process for at least a year.  by most of the criteria by which we run our lives, I shouldn't have known her or much of her or been able to follow her progress as she was dying.

but this is a new age and wonderful toys exist that allow us to be a part of one another's lives even as we live and die thousands of miles from each other.  I was friends with her on facebook and kept up with her by reading her blog.  my wife was better friends with her:  last winter, in the midst of dealing with her own dad's active dying process, her chaplaincy internship, and working fulltime, she crocheted turquoise a prayer shawl and then took it when she visited her (her rationale for flying to california in the midst of so much busyness and our dwindling bank account:  "I would rather see her alive than view her body," a principle with which I agree). 

I know what was important to her--her friends, her cat, her art and her life--only because I knew her through a little box perched on the lip of my couch from which I can communicate with so many.  I only knew of her death this morning because of a post from a mutual friend relaying the information on a website that, in my youth, would have been unthinkable (or we thought of it in terms of horror or dystopia) but in her youth--she was in her late 40s--had developed into something that the youth we know grow up mastering the intricacies do so so quickly that new developments come in months rather than decades.  this connective tissue is composed of electricity and pulses in addition to blood and muscle and it is because of it that I can reach out and be reached out to.  it is because of it that I could know and appreciate turquoise.

I mourn my friend turquoise.  I celebrate her life.  that I can do both and let you know of it is a product of the times in which we live.  I don't know if turquoise knew this song but I think she would have appreciated the message (and the beat).

eight cows: sangha

this is a mashup I made for my class on buddhism.  it's grainier than the original which is apparently a consequence of a 20-minute video being converted to a size suitable for uploading.  we're expected to do a dharma talk on a topic of our choice and I determined mine would be on sangha, mostly because I'd already done a sermon on that about 6 years ago and still had the research.  but when the crunch came, I opted to do a video rather than a sermon and the message of the dharma talk also changed.  I'm rather proud of the outcome, although as I let the class know last night if I'd had my druthers I'd have cut some of the more sensational images out of the iranian sufi video clip since the sufis represented include the more extreme member who expect their faith makes their flesh impenetrable to pain.  thus the hammering of daggers into heads.

still, I like it and I'd have to call it a hit among my classmates who seemed somewhat agog at the presentation.  that may have been amazement at my accomplishment or it may have been astonishment at my gall, I never can tell.  

scrabble

"the scrabble tournament is held in the crazy horse saloon, which is decorated in an english version of a western theme. the men's bathroom is marked BRAVES. I buy my 1st irish whiskey of the morning at the young dudes bad and look around the room, which is packed with 100 little card tables, each of which is equipped with 2, 3, or 4 spindly folding chairs with seats made of hospital-green plastic. some damaged person has assembled tiny darly little silver pie tins, with diameters equaling no more than 3 inches, each containing a wizened fruit pie, into perfect geometric stacks on dozens of tables where there aren't any people.

"...I secretly hate scrabble, for the simple reason that anyone hates scrabble, which is that I am bad at it, and because words aren't a game. a single word can destroy a person's soul, his faith in humanity, and other serious assets. no one who understands the exigencies inherent in language wants to waste words on a scrabble board.

"...the impact of tile on tile is muffled in a way that seems to suggest something fucked up is happening inside the bag. good letters are being exchanged for bad...I feel like every time I start to love rock and roll again my favorite singer kills himself, or else I run into some...asshole wearing black-rimmed glasses and a t-shirt that reads THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE THE FUTURE."

--from "letter from minehead: underacheivers please try harder: indie rock reunites on the english coast" by david samuels in the may 2011 issue of harper's magazine

I love to play scrabble. every night before we go to sleep my wife and I play at least a few hands of a game. we play a variation app on our cellphones called "wordsmith" the 4 nights a week she's staying in a little room in the center of the hub while doing her clinical experience. in our 20+ years of marriage we've owned and played multiple versions of the game, from the original board game to a special travel version to the game she downloaded to her palm pilot some years ago (and that we're likely to replace soon since the palm is dying the slow, merciless death that electronics are heir to) that we've found works best. for me, it's somewhat like an easier version of crossword puzzles cuz I don't have to make connections beyond a single letter and the words I use tax only my vocabulary and not my knowledge.

but I also dig why some people don't like the game. it can be time-consuming (sometimes we play a speeded-up version in which each of us has only 30 seconds to play--I'm especially a timehogger when coming up with words) and it can be annoying and 1 can feel pissy when a particularly well-crafted game suddenly goes titsup at the acquisition of that bastard "q" tile.

still, I don't think there are too many games that have as intrinsic an appeal as scrabble. it's a good icebreaker and a good game to play while drinking beer (hard liquor might kill off too many braincells to make it worthwhile). I've never played it while smoking herb but I can imagine that, like a 2nd summit, it would help 1 loosen up and allow the words to flow more smoothly.

worship service mashup

this is a mashup I made both for a teaching presentation for my xian education class and for next monday's CPE worship service. by that time we'll have reached the midpoint in our experience (which ends mid-january). what I wanted to get across was the sense that this is tough but it's an effort we, and our future congregants, will be the better for.

do the best things in the worst times

this morning I served pulpit supply--was the guest preacher--at 2 ucc congregations in colby and athens, wi, where I was welcomed and treated well, but I don't expect I'll be asked by either of them to return. the sermon below is what I wrote for them. I was somewhat at a disadvantage since I only had to write a 5-6 page sermon but I didn't have time to do that so I wrote an 8 page sermon that I hacked and slashed down to 6 and a half. this is the result.

Psalms 133 Sermon


“Do the Best Things in the Worst Times”
A Sermon Delivered to The 1st United Church of Christ,
Colby and Athens, Wisconsin, August 14, 2011,

I looked it up and you folks weren't part of the recall election last Tuesday. You missed a great election. I live in the 10th district where there are particularly harsh feelings about our state senator and what she has and hasn’t done for the people of her district in the last decade. We’re gearing up for yet another in other districts next week. In this last election, as elections are wont to do, some people came away happy and many came away angry. That’s as it’s always been. From the perspective of an American voter in the early 21st century, it certainly looks like the country is as divided as it’s ever been, maybe more so than at any time in American history. Republicans and Democrats, conservatives and progressives, these positions are miles apart, aren’t they, seemingly irreconcilable. It’s never been this divisive, we’ve never been as separate before, certainly not in our lifetimes.

Only if “our lifetimes” don’t include the protests against the war in Vietnam when it seemed not a week went by without some violent demonstration, counterdemonstration, the bombings at the University in Madison or the police responses at the Chicago Democratic National Convention and Kent State. We have yet to experience many political conflagrations, certainly not like Norway, for instance, has. And for some of us, “our lifetimes” include the Great Depression, during which them what had went to whatever lengths they felt necessary—up to and including hiring private police forces who infamously used clubs and revolvers and set fires at mines like Ludlow, Lattimer and Columbine—to keep them what hadn’t who were beginning to unionize. And while none of us can count it as happening in “our lifetimes,” certainly today’s divisions are as nothing compared with the period of 1840-1865 when slavery and freedom were such contentious issues the country took up arms against itself to settle the matter.

None of us is immune to the wish-fulfillment of blame. Just the other day I told my wife I’d been thinking that afternoon about leaving her and moving out into the middle of the woods with no phone and no car and no internet and spending my days standing at the end of my driveway and shaking my fist at everyone who passes. She reminded me that if I left her I’d need to take three of our animals and their upkeep would surely cut into my fist-shaking time so I might as well stay home.

Some people blame President Obama for the country’s divisiveness and some people blame Republicans as if somehow one side or the other wants to govern a divided, off-kilter nation. Some blame public religion or the lack of public religions as if churches and synagogues and mosques don’t all have their own schisms and issues going on. Something has left us feeling like there’s something between us, as if there’s, not a wall exactly, but a sense of disconnect. We’re missing one another, walking past each other, even though we’re saying “Hi” and shaking hands, as if the other person somehow isn’t quite there.

The Psalm we read this morning seems almost to comment on this disconnect. “How pleasant it is,” the psalmist writes, “when kindred live together in unity!” Had that been written today I’d suspect the author of sarcasm at the least, dismay at the worst.

Because we don’t live in unity, do we? I mean, well, we might here in this church and even here in this town, but as a state? As a nation? No, sir, not a bit of it. We’re constantly yelling at one another over the radio and the television and the internet—you always know someone doesn’t trust his words WHEN HE TYPES OUT HIS MESSAGE IN ALL CAPS—and sometimes at the family barbecue and at work. Some of us are frustrated because we’re working two and three jobs and some of us because we aren’t even working one. Sometimes it seems the single difference between the uprisings going on this year in some Arab nations or Great Britain and the US is that no one here has thought to start heaving bricks at cops. That may change. After all, this is America, where we have more handguns available than bricks.

But the psalmist isn’t being sarcastic. He or she isn’t being ironic. He or she is quite sincere. How can that be, since the psalmist was living in a wonderful age when everyone was closer to god and thought of god all the time, paid attention to god and followed god’s laws to the best of his or her ability, or at least wasn’t actively fighting god and religion the way some people seem to do now? I'm not a believer in a golden age but think on this. A mere 2 years ago we saw an incredible outpouring of relief and hope—I felt it and I’m certain many of you did too—when Barack Obama, whose campaign slogan was the positive "yes, we can," was elected. We've lost that hope somewhere between then and now. We have moved from the radical notion that "yes, we can" to a politics of "no, you can't."

This is not entirely unexpected but what makes it particularly galling is that, amid the national and local talk of economic feasibility, of cost benefit and entitlement and loss and "what it costs the taxpayers," there is no corresponding talk about human beings. Of sharing. Of helping one another. Of community. We have entered a time and political place when a majority of citizens seem to feel the motto of the US ought to be changed from e pluribus unum, "out of many, one," to meeum habeo, "I got mine."

Has it ever been any different? Well, sure, right there, Psalm 133. That’s certainly a golden moment when everyone was looking out for one another. If only we could resurrect that time, go back to everyone looking out for his neighbor and there wasn’t all this infighting and backstabbing and calling one another names.

As Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, “It’s pretty to think so.” The truth is there’s never any golden time, never a silver or a bronze age as compared with our contemporary lead one when people had one another’s best interests at heart and truly loved their neighbors and had one another uppermost in their thoughts. Scholars don’t know when individual psalms were created or even written down but the book as it comes down to contemporary readers was probably anthologized during the 4th Century BCE, the period after the Babylonian Empire was conquered by the Persians whose king, Xerxes—you may remember him as the villain of the movie 300—allowed the Israelites to return to their homeland and helped in the restoration of the Second Temple. Some of them predate the Babylonian Exile and the destruction of the Temple. The transcriber of 133 is writing at a time when the people of Israel have come together out of a century—for the Jews of the northern kingdom, two centuries—of exile and second-class citizenship in a foreign land. To be sure, not everyone was moved out of what was once Israel and Judah, only the nobility and the most important citizens. Thousands of others were left essentially leaderless and without protection, victimized by anyone who might have happened along with a superior weapon and nothing to lose.

When we think about exile today we think of refugee camps, of malaria and stagnant water and death by diseases easily cured in less-crowded places, and it was like that in those times too. The book of Psalms is divided into several types, the most common of which, you might not be surprised to learn, is the individual lament, the crying out to god for help for oneself. There are also communal laments whose tragedies reflect contemporary experiences in the Sudan and Somalia:

"My days pass away like smoke, and my bones burn like a furnace. My heart is stricken and withered like grass; I am too wasted to eat my bread. Because of my loud groaning my bones cling to my skin…All day long my enemies taunt me; those who deride me use my name for a curse. For I eat ashes like bread, and mingle tears with my drink, because of your indignation and anger; for you have lifted me up and thrown me aside. My days are like an evening shadow; I wither away like grass."

There are also songs or psalms of trust, of individual and communal thanksgiving. “O Lord, my God, I will give thanks to you forever.” There are paeans to divinity and creation, songs of celebration and liturgies, psalms of kingship and royalty and celebrating the lineage of David (many of these were written during the times when Israel and Judah, the northern and southern kingdoms, were kingdoms ruled by David’s descendants). There are psalms celebrating Zion and pilgrimage and there are songs about wisdom. There are songs of immense beauty and trust: “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures; he leads me beside still waters; he restores my soul. He leads me in right paths for his name’s sake.” And there are songs of great cruelty and vengeance: “Happy shall be they who pay [Babylon] back what you have done to us! Happy shall they be who take your babies and dash their brains against the rock!” The Psalms are a repository for nearly every emotion, good and bad, a people in exile felt.

But in 133, subtitled a song of ascent, one which people sung as they made pilgrimage up the hills of Jerusalem, the people are coming together again after being apart for so long and they sing about the pleasure of being with one another as a community and as a people. You must understand, in this time and place, if you had no people and you had no land, and no way to make certain other people recognized those two things, then you were the equivalent of an unbranded steer in 1870s Abilene, Texas. Free to be owned and done with by anyone who took the trouble to acquire you and with no more access to redress than that steer had. It was a blessing to be with one another again. To be one people. To be a single, unified group.

Our Muslim friends and neighbors are currently celebrating Ramadan which takes as its initial offer that, like Gandhi said, we should be the change we want to see in the world—Surah 2: 183 and 185 of the Qur’an reads “O you who believe, fasting is decreed for you, as it was decreed for those before you, that you may attain salvation…Ramadan is the month during which the Quran was revealed, providing guidance for the people, clear teachings, and the statute book. Those of you who witness this month shall fast…GOD wishes for you convenience, not hardship, that you may fulfill your obligations, and to glorify GOD for guiding you, and to express your appreciation”—and adds to it the idea that we should all do it together. This is communal experience at its best, acknowledging the shared hunger for something outside oneself and then coming together to expunge that hunger as a community.

African culture reproaches us to remember, “I am because we are.” Annie Dillard in her book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek reminds us that we have an obligation “to keep the world from falling apart.” To do this we must come together to, as author Richard Gilbert puts it, “do the best things in the worst times.” We do this to bring about what my denomination, Unitarian Universalism, calls the Beloved Community and what Christians call the Kingdom of God.

What is this hard work we should do, what should this community look like? I don’t exactly know and for each of us it might be a little different. E.B. White, author of children’s classics Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little, admitted he woke each morning “torn between the desire to improve the world and the desire to enjoy the world. This,” he notes, “makes it hard to plan the day.”

But this I do know. Take a moment to look to the left of you, and then to the right. Take a moment to smile at the person you see. Take his or her hand. Feel the warmth of their hands, the pulse just fluttering beneath the surface, the strong life that is there. How good it is when we are together. These are the companions you are to do this work with. You will find no better.